Padding Quietly Down the Hall

I haven’t posted here in a long time. I’ve wanted to. I have several posts partly written, just waiting on getting the last bits of example nailed down. But, as you can see, I haven’t finished the polishing I feel is necessary before posting them.

So, in an effort to jump-start my return to regular blogging, I’m going to do what everyone else is doing: I’m going to yammer about the iPad for a few paragraphs.

I am not, however, going to make some drooling prediction about it changing the world. I am also not going to make some frothing statement about how clueless Apple was to leave out my dream feature. I am not even going to pontificate about whether or not I’ll be buying one (or who else I think should or should not buy one).

Instead, I’d like to point out two things about the iPad that, I feel, have been underconsidered. Those two things are price and file-sharing.

Price

$499. Five hundred dollars less than what seemed to be the most popular pre-announcement prediction. This is amazing because it hits many sweet spots.

Five hundred dollars is basically Geek Toy money. No, it’s not impulse-buy, “I tossed it in my cart to get free shipping at Amazon,” money. But, for your typical, gadget-loving geek, ~$2^9 is, “Yeah, I was thinking about sampling the market anyway.” That means it’s going to have myriad creative eyes and brains contemplating all sorts of mixed-up, new, different uses from day one. By day thirty, I guarantee you will see a demo of something surprising.

Woah. Almost drooled a bit there. Calming down now.

Five hundred dollars, or more specifically sub-1k, is also the price that pundits have been demanding from Apple. There’s always been the Mac mini, but that’s not portable, and its sub-$1000 price really depends on you already owning a keyboard, mouse, and monitor (or doing your own bargain hunting). The iPad now opens the doors to people who want a real Apple computer for half the price of a MacBook (ignoring resale and discount programs).

File-sharing

Yes, a real computer. How can I say this with a straight face? It’s all because of a new feature in the SDK: file-sharing.

The iPhone platform, until now, has not been designed for content creation. Consume all you want, but only produce short emails and the occasional snapshot. This means that it wasn’t a problem that there was no good way to transfer the content you produced onto and off of the device. The small bits produced went out in email. The things consumed, weren’t edited. (A few apps, like the excellent GoodReader, built in HTTP servers, just to get around this trouble.)

The iPad, though, has space and even dedicated hardware to provide UI for content creation. Indeed, Apple has ported the entire iWork suite to the device! In order for this to be of any use to anyone, though, there also needed to be a way to transfer that content elsewhere. Luckily, there is, in the form of a folder that each application can expose, which shows up as a directory on a drive when the iPad is plugged into a computer, just like any other USB drive. There is even a facility for asking other applications on the device to open files from the shared directory. No more bouncing things through remote network machines, just to get data moved between apps, or between the iPad and a desktop.

So that’s it. It’s cheap, and it can do more stuff. In a few months, I expect to see something really interesting.